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If you do this, you’ll also find that it’s much cheaper to retain a loyal customer than it is to constantly acquire new ones. 82% of companies asked in our Cross Channel Marketing report agree that customer retention is cheaper than acquisition.

Customer retention is a must for any business where its goals are for long-term success. Here are some of the ways that you can achieve this.

You’ve driven a customer to your site with an effective paid search campaign, you’ve kept their attention with some beautifully persuasive design and a first class user experience.

Then by making the checkout as hassle free as possible and by offering them free shipping and a terrific returns policy you’ve given them an exemplary ecommerce experience… Fantastic work! Now you can go home early and watch Adventure Time.

But wait! How do you encourage your customers to come back? How do you use the goodwill fostered during that first experience into something even more meaningful?

Alright you don’t have to go off and buy a boat together, but it would be great if they popped their head round the door every so often in the future. After all retention costs far less than acquisition and achieving higher customer lifetime value makes your business a much stronger prospect for the future.

Loyal customers are extremely important for businesses as constantly attracting new shoppers and converting them into customers is a costly process.

In fact data from the new Econsultancy/Responsys Cross-Channel Marketing Report 2013 shows the value of building customer relationships, as 70% of respondents agreed that “it is cheaper to retain than acquire a customer.”

Similarly, nearly half (49%) agreed that “pound for pound, we achieve better ROI by investing in relationship over acquisition marketing”.

However businesses aren’t necessarily making a huge effort to retain their customers, as just 30% of companies say they are “very committed” to relationship marketing, with 22% conducting no relationship marketing at all.

With the cost of acquisition of new customers relatively high through search engines, affiliates or other channels, it pays to keep hold of the customers that you already have on your side, to encourage repeat visits, building for the lifetime value of that customer rather than taking a quick win.

You cannot buy loyalty in the true sense of the word, it has to be earned, but the good news is that there are a number of ways that you can foster it:

Digital tools now reach across companies (from sales to support) and across the entire customer experience. This span is making running digital channels as silos increasingly costly and difficult to scale.

Organizations that seek to rationalize operations, use data effectively, and personalize smart experiences for clients need alignment around a digital experience plan.

This is the first of a series of posts on why digital experience planning has become a strategic priority of a growing tribe of digital leaders.

Is social media, and the data it produces, overvalued? As companies continue to struggle the ROI from their social initiatives, some are starting to suggest that social’s impact might have been overestimated.

But social media proponents say not so fast: social media is the digital channel for word-of-mouth, and although word-of-mouth has historically been hard to quantify, its importance is rarely questioned. Which raises an interesting question: instead of talking about social media, should we be talking about word-of-mouth?

This month, there has been some interesting data concerning what online retailers think about the importance of returning customers and some juicy trends highlighting the real worth of shoppers who come back for more compared to first time buyers.

Customer acquisition and retention is the lifeblood of most businesses.

But a company’s customer acquisition and retention can only be as strong
as the profitability of a company’s customer relationships. In other
words, if you’re acquiring and retaining customers that are only
marginally profitable, or not profitable at all, chances are you won’t
thrive.